Relations between language and cognition in native-signing children with autism spectrum disorder.
Lifelong sign language does not wipe out autism-related language and social-cognition delays.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Shield et al. (2016) compared native-signing children with autism to deaf peers without autism.
All kids had used American Sign Language since birth.
The team tested ASL understanding, theory-of-mind, and visual perspective-taking.
What they found
The autistic group scored lower on every measure.
Even lifelong sign exposure did not close the language or social-cognition gap.
Early visual input alone was not enough to offset autism-related delays.
How this fits with other research
Older ABA studies by McGee et al. (1983) and Remington et al. (1983) showed non-signing autistic children can learn to sign when taught with prompts and reinforcement.
Those papers seem to clash with Shield et al. (2016), but the difference is training versus exposure.
Explicit teaching produced new signs; natural exposure did not fix deeper comprehension problems.
Shield et al. (2015) found the same kids avoided sign pronouns, hinting that small grammar pieces lag before larger language and theory-of-mind gaps appear.
Hartley et al. (2019) extend the point: when school-age autistic children are matched for language level, picture-understanding deficits vanish, suggesting modality matters less than overall language skill.
Why it matters
If you work with signing autistic clients, do not assume early sign immersion has already solved language or perspective-taking issues.
Screen comprehension and theory-of-mind separately, then add targeted teaching.
For non-signers, the 1983 studies still justify sign training, but plan extra support for the social-use side.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Run a quick ASL receptive-vocabulary probe before assuming a signing client understands social signs like think-know.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two populations have been found to exhibit delays in theory of mind (ToM): deaf children of hearing parents and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Deaf children exposed to sign from birth by their deaf parents, however, show no such delay, suggesting that early language exposure is key to ToM development. Sign languages also present frequent opportunities with visual perspective-taking (VPT), leading to the question of whether sign exposure could benefit children with ASD. We present the first study of children with ASD exposed to sign from birth by their deaf parents. Seventeen native-signing children with a confirmed ASD diagnosis and a chronological- and mental age-matched control group of 18 typically developing (TD) native-signing deaf children were tested on American Sign Language (ASL) comprehension, two minimally verbal social cognition tasks (ToM and VPT), and one spatial cognition task (mental rotation). The TD children outperformed the children with ASD on ASL comprehension (p < 0.0001), ToM (p = 0.02), and VPT (p < 0.01), but not mental rotation (p = 0.12). Language strongly correlated with ToM (p < 0.01) and VPT (p < 0.001), but not mental rotation (p = ns). Native exposure to sign is thus insufficient to overcome the language and social impairments implicated in ASD. Contrary to the hypothesis that sign could provide a scaffold for ToM skills, we find that signing children with ASD are unable to access language so as to gain any potential benefit sign might confer. Our results support a strong link between the development of social cognition and language, regardless of modality, for TD and ASD children. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1304-1315. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1621